The Australian media’s last news journalists in China quit the country in a hurry this week. For the first time in nearly 50 years there’s no-one from across the ditch covering this critical country - and other western reporters who left have not been replaced. How might this change the picture of China we get from our media?
Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Bill Birtles waving as he arrives in Sydney on September 8, 2020, after leaving China amid worsening diplomatic relations between the two countries. Photo: AFP / Taryn Southcombe via AFP
Back in 2016, edgy Australian TV drama Secret City told the story of a political journalist in Canberra caught up in a deadly diplomatic dispute with China.
She discovered an Australian citizen protesting about human rights had been held in Beijing but secretly sent back to Australia.
"China doesn't crave the world's approval. Unlike the Americans, we can handle not being liked" a diplomat neck-deep in the dirty dealings declared as the plot thickened.
It was based on books by an Australian political journalist - Chris Uhlmann - whose insider’s knowledge of the Canberra beltway added authenticity.
In the end it was of course only fiction, but this week life imitated art this week - sort of - in reverse.
Two Australian journalists in China returned home in a hurry after an extraordinary diplomatic standoff.
The ABC’s Bill Birtles and Michael Smith from the Australian Financial Review were the last Australian journalists left in China working for Australian outlets.
Uniformed officers simultaneously visited the homes of Mr Smith in Shanghai and Mr Birtles in Beijing after midnight on Thursday last week.
Both journalists were told they were persons of interest in an investigation into TV presenter Cheng Lei - an Australian who works for the state-owned China Global Television Network. She has been detained since mid-August, suspected of "criminal activity endangering China's national security".
Birtles had spent four days in Australia's embassy in Beijing, while Smith took refuge in Australia's Shanghai consulate as diplomats negotiated with Chinese officials to allow them to leave the country.
Michael Smith told his own paper: 'I feared being disappeared'
“It was intensely political,” Bill Birtles told the ABC once he was safely home.
While getting the pair home solved one problem it has but created another: there are no accredited Australian media journalists left in China - and China has not issued new visas for journalists to replace them
The ABC's Beijing bureau opened in 1973, shortly after Australia normalised relations with Mao Zedong’s China.
Gaven Morris, news director ABC Australia. Photo: PHOTO / RNZ Mediawatch
"Understanding China, the relationship between our two countries is probably the biggest story of our time and having our people on the ground working with our local team is absolutely critical for the ABC," said ABC News director Gaven Morris.
New Zealander Anna Fifield - soon to head home herself to become editor of the Dominion Post - is the current Washington Post bureau chief in Beijing.
“Journalists here routinely face harassment from authorities. When I head out to do reporting I expect it . . . and often I’m surrounded by police cars and they want to know what I’m doing,“ she said.
“That sort of thing has become commonplace but what Bill Birtles and Mike Smith experienced has been unprecedented and really shocking. We have never faced . . . the threat of detention on really serious charges. This is clearly an escalation,“ Anna Fifield told Mediawatch.
Birtles and Smith are not the only reporters forced to quit China lately before their time was up.
In March, Beijing expelled 14 American journalists working at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post in retaliation for the Trump Administration's decision to restrict staff at Chinese state media outlets in the United States.
Anna Fifield Photo: Supplied
“They were given five days to leave the country - many of them after having lived here for years. This was part of this tit-for-tat between China and the US. Previously China expelled three Wall Street Journal reporters over a headline in an opinion piece in the paper but none of those reporters had anything to do with it," she said.
"We were really locked in a downward spiral there with China expelling some journalists, then America would expel some journalists and it still going on now,“ she said.
Recently China's second most senior diplomat in Australia told the National Press Club in Canberra the Australian government "hurt China's feelings" by calling for inquiry into China’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.
How much of the crackdown on foreign journalists is about journalism and how much is it a diplomatic row?
“In a way it’s a two-for-one but definitely the Chinese authorities do not like the foreign press and their pesky habit of telling a different story from the one that the Chinese government wants told,” Anna Fifield told Mediawatch.
“Anything that doesn’t fit with their idea of China as a rising and responsible global power - that’s the sort of stuff they want to quash,” she said.
“Increasingly they’re using the journalists as a tool in this broader fight and it’s been ramped up by the coronavirus because China sees that as damaging to selling itself as a peaceful global power. The reporting showed they were putting politics before public health,” Anna Fifield told Mediawatch.
The US-based Committee to Protect Journalists described the treatment of Birtles and Smith as "a new low for the steadily intensifying mistreatment of foreign correspondents".
"As far as the Chinese are concerned the gloves have come off," Steven Butler, the committee's Asia programme co-ordinator said.
He told the ABC it was possible than in the near future there could be no accredited international reporters left to report from China.
Could China really become a news desert for foreign media?
“Traditionally they’ve done that just by making our work difficult but it’s really taken on a new dimension this year,” Anna Fifield said.
“The journalists who were expelled are still doing great work about China and digging into things but what’s being lost is reporting of daily life that comes through when you have foreign correspondents on the ground,” she said.
“Our job is to show what life is like in China for audiences who are not here. If you don’t have correspondents based here, you get analysts and people focusing on diplomacy or relying on social media which is heavily censored. You lose a lot of the intimacy with what is really happening on the ground,” she said.
“That is really detrimental to the world’s understanding of China - but also to China itself. China is shooting itself in the foot because . . . you won’t have the kind of stories about what mums and dads in China want for the kids or how people are living - the humanising content that is my favourite thing about being a foreign correspondent,” Anna Fifield told Mediawatch.
